AMD Details Early Quad-Core Plans

In a detailed briefing for analysts in New York on Friday, executives at Advanced Micro Devices painted the company as making “irreversible progress” into new architectures, specifically multicore microprocessors and 64-bit processing.

Executives confirmed that the company plans to enhance its Opteron enterprise processor line to four cores in 2007, adding focused optimizations to manage power and improve throughput.

Going forward, AMD executives said its progress will be defined by metrics like “throughput per watts per dollars”, backed by specific technologies that it will try to establish as industry standards, rather than following rival Intel’s lead.

“We believe the purpose of our company is to reinvent the dynamics of the microprocessor industry,” said Hector Ruiz, AMD’s president, chairman and chief executive officer.

Future enhancements to the AMD core architecture will include per-core power management, improvements to the HyperTransport specification, secure execution, and even dedicated coprocessors, Chuck Moore, who oversees AMD’s core microprocessor architectures, told analysts.

On the surface, AMD’s roadmaps forward bear superficial resemblances to Intel’s, in that both companies share a desire to increase the number of cores on the processor die. Both companies also are developing technologies like virtualization, which can share system resources among concurrent instances of an operating system. Intel, however, has leaned heavily toward developing platforms, backed with a “grab bag” of supporting technologies, according to Dirk Meyer, AMD’s president of its processor division.

“We think at AMD [the move toward platforms] is a good trend; it signals a move away from speeds and feeds and a random grab bag of features,” Meyer said. “We’re focused on the end value for the end-user community.”

AMD opened its meeting by touting its ties to Hollywood, a strategy that AMD executives said they will increasingly adopt going forward. Continued…